MapSCII – A Braille and ASCII world map renderer for the console

by itherseedon 4/9/2024, 2:58 AMwith 23 comments

by tonisherillon 4/9/2024, 7:50 AM

Anyone else also looking around for more tools like MapSCII, this site frequently updates with other TUI and CLI tools with handy and quick install instructions.

https://terminaltrove.com/

I can also see they have mapscii too which is great.

https://terminaltrove.com/mapscii/

There's also awesome-tuis as well which I also find very useful as well.

https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis

by boxedon 4/9/2024, 7:12 AM

Super cool!

I do wish there were much better algorithms for ascii art. The best manual ascii/ansi art humans produced during the peak of that scene is extremely far ahead of any algorithm I've seen.

by rastapastaon 4/9/2024, 8:42 AM

Thanks for the kudos and the shared joy :) AMA, happy to answer any potential questions!

by teruakohatuon 4/9/2024, 6:37 AM

Playing around with that gave me a lot of joy. Would this have worked during the heyday of telnet servers? Or was hardware and connection speeds fast enough to have made this practical?

by lynx23on 4/9/2024, 9:48 AM

BTW braille patterns, I wrote a braille backend for Haskell Diagrams: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/diagrams-braille

Lets you also mix text and braille, although the positioning is a little fragile.

by girishsoon 4/9/2024, 10:40 AM

This reminded me of a quine by a member of the Ruby core team - Yusuke Endoh.

Spinning globe in the terminal!

https://gist.github.com/shime/f0ebe84ca42c33b51d42

by NelsonMinaron 4/9/2024, 3:23 PM

I don't know how to read Braille. Does this rendering work at all to someone who knows how to read Braille by touch? Or is it more using the glyphs as a form of visual ASCII-like art?

I took a quick look online and it seems like actual tactile maps are using raised lines for the boundaries and Braille for text labels. e.g. https://www.aph.org/product/world-maps/

by basemion 4/9/2024, 7:35 AM

> Sorry, you reached a full server, please try again.

Retrying in couple of days, HN will release the hug by then

by tambourine_manon 4/9/2024, 1:57 PM

It's so weird that Hollywood has trained us to think that a TUI is much more hacky/bleeding-edge/pro than a GUI.

Back in the 80/90s the future was 3D GUI, today the future is retro.

All this to say, very cool project.

by baudauxon 4/9/2024, 9:00 AM

You can launch telnet in exaequOS.com if you do not have telnet installed. (I am the creator)

Open havoc terminal and type: telnet mapscii.me 23

by ulrischaon 4/9/2024, 5:23 PM

Interesting. But I wonder how one could use this with a Braille line?

by panki27on 4/9/2024, 7:40 AM

> Your connection timed out.

But I get to see the lovely logo!

by aquiron 4/9/2024, 8:14 AM

Awesome! Thanks for spending time on this.

by rOOb85on 4/9/2024, 7:46 AM

I love stuff like this!

by fexedon 4/9/2024, 8:12 AM

This is amazing

by polyterativeon 4/9/2024, 8:26 AM

cool